Once an individual dies, his true intentions and feelings can never be known. People can speculate all they want, but unless they have had similar experiences as the individual, they must refrain all judgments. In the nonfiction work Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, many readers have harshly judged the main character, Chris McCandless, as stupid and thoughtless for his dangerous and ultimately fatal adventure in the raw wilderness of Alaska; many have even said he had been suicidal. The author attempts to display Chris as a human being with meaningful intentions and emotional yearning rather than just a stereotypical, reckless vagabond by using his own story as a similar experience to Chris’, so readers can begin to understand Chris from a more personal level. In the chapter “The Stikine Ice Cap”, Krakauer explains his own conflict with his father, his desire for thrill and the unknown, and his eventual epiphany about the terrible loneliness in isolation from society to showcase an almost identical experience to that of McCandless.

In the chapter “The Stikine Ice Cap”, Krakauer relates himself to Chris in the way that he also has an aristocratic father whose views on life differ from his own. His father is obsessed with perfection and expects him to pursue a profession in either law or medicine, which Krakauer sees as authoritarian and “felt oppressed by the old man’s expectations” (148). Chris also regards his parents in the same way, constantly pushing him to pursue an impressive career to bring him wealth and material success, what Chris abhorrs the most about his family and his society. Having a different belief on life from what his father expects, he thinks his father is “so irrational, so oppressive, disrespectful, and insulting that I finally passed my breaking point” (64). Krakauer emphasizes further that their fathers lead the very lives that he and Chris want to avoid, and they ultimately do by escaping their society. Krakauer rebelliously decides “I...

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...tried to isolate himself from the society, it wasn’t possible to do it while living in the society, and that’s why he escaped into the wilderness. So, the most affective fact for him to isolate himself from the society and therefore escaping into the wild, was his inability to forgive.
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...Dec 9, 2009
Paper #2
Into the Wild
Into the Wild is a book about a young man named Chris McCandless and his decision to go off and live in the wild. He decided to walk deep into the Alaskan wilderness and abandon all of his possessions and family. This book is the authors, Jon Krakauer, version of Chris McCandless’ story put together through interviewing and speaking with people who knew Chris as well as by using letters Chris wrote to his loved...

...believe Chris McCandless was neither crazy nor stupid; in fact, I believe him to be a visionary. After receiving and fully utilizing a four-year education at Emory University in Georgia, he decided to leave society behind and venture off into the wild with only the things he deemed truly necessary. He left society in search of happiness and the truth behind what makes us all happy. Coming from a wealthy, upper-middleclass family, he learned to utterly despise the materialistic...

...of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life” –Leo Tolstoy. Leo Tolstoy’s views and ideas, along with other philosophers, would determine the internal drive and the overall decisions of an individual named Chris McCandless. The book Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, is the story of a man named Chris McCandless that ventures into the great Alaskan wilderness to seek meaning in his true self. Chris is a twenty-four year old from Virginia who graduated from Emory University...

...Into the WildEssay
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
-Henry David Thoreau
In Krakauers “ Into the wild,” a young idealist set off on a journey heavily influenced by the literature in his life. With Thoreau, London, and Tolstoy at hand,...

...nature. Chris McCandless went into the wild in April of 1992 leaving all his possessions behind, giving his money away to charity, and changing his name. He sacrificed everything to go on an adventure or a life time. Chris McCandless’s journey to the wild reflects the ideas American Romantic writers of the 1800’s wrote and only dreamed of doing.
McCandless is admired by many for his adventurous spirit and courage. When reading into the...

...objects in the world as small versions of the whole universe and to trust their individual intuitions. The two most noted American transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. An example of transcendentalism is the book "Into the Wild". In the book Chris McCandless serves as a prime example of transcendentalism. Chris goes through the motions of a normal kid all the way through college. After graduation, he cuts all connections he has to the monotonous...

...sure to be failure”. Into the Wild is a biographical novel written by Jon Krakauer, about Chris McCandless and his journey to the Stampede Trail to live alone in the Alaskan brush. Chris McCandless met his untimely and tragic death because of his unpreparedness through his pride and his inability to expect the unexpected.
Chris McCandless did not predict many circumstances that happened to him while in the brush. When Chris McCandless tried to walk out of the...